Your One Stop Tenant Improvement Shop
Upgrade your fire alarms to the new standard with IP communications and watch analog telephone lines become a thing of the past. As traditional phone lines fall by the wayside, digital systems such as Voice over IP (VoIP), GSM cellular networks, and fiber optics are taking their place. But if your fire alarm communications still depend on outdated phone lines, your system’s reliability is being sacrificed ... »»»
Ensure your sprinklers pass the test. Inspect often to ensure your fire protection system is ready at a moment’s notice. Coughing up $300-500 for a yearly inspection could save you millions in property damage and business interruptions. With major initiatives competing for your attention, the state of your sprinklers is probably low on your priority list. But let your maintenance and inspection routine become lax and you could be compromising your life safety with every passing minute ... »»»
The column in the May 18 issue of the Journal of Commerce by Carolyn Campbell with the B.C. Ready Mixed Concrete Association significantly misrepresented the fire in the Remy in Richmond. It notably confused the fire risk of a building under construction with the fire risk of a completed building. These risks are entirely dissimilar. One could equally use the argument that a fire in a car plant means that all cars are unsafe to drive ... »»»
C'mon people, the fire was an unfortunate course-of-construction occurrence. It had nothing to do with building codes. To a thirsty flame, the structure was merely a pile of dry kindling. At the same stage of construction, a three-or four-storey woodframe structure would have suffered the same fate. If construction had been complete, with all safety systems installed -sprinklers, fire breaks, alarms, etc. -a fire would likely be contained to a single suite or isolated to one small area of the building and dealt with expeditiously ... »»»
The safety of six-storey wood frame construction is being questioned after a housing project, being built under new regulations, was destroyed by a fire in Richmond, B.C. The Office of Housing and Construction adopted changes to the B.C. Building Code in April 2009, which increased the limit on wood-frame structures from four to six storeys ... »»»